Stephanie's post got me thinking yesterday about how much I've learned from other people since I started and how seldom I bother to get involved in the "OMG the world is ending HALP!!!" threads over there anymore. The areas that I can be the most helpful in are the more technical aspects of all of this but I can't think straight when all of that artistic temperament is flying around. I react like Olivia de Havilland does in this video
Now that Mary has started an SEO team that's nice and calm and hysteria-free I volunteered to be a leader and help her out with the basic stuff so that she can focus on the higher level things that very few of us understand completely. She helps so many people for free even though she does it professionally and I still learn something new from her every day. It's fun to have found a nexus between what I already do well and what I want to learn to do.
Please come see my handmade designer plus size sweaters, sweater coats, capes and shrugs at MirabilisFashions.com
Showing posts with label Etsy SEO. Search Engine Optimization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Etsy SEO. Search Engine Optimization. Show all posts
Friday, January 13, 2012
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Joy, Joy: Testing Relevancy When You Have 200+ Listings-Relevancy is working
So, Etsy recently decided to make it so that relevancy search is default, and as Karen said before, the forums are all up in arms over it.
As someone who can't throw 20¢ at renewing often, I decided to try to get into Google search from the get go, so I don't really have all that much to do in my shop for relevancy.
But I do currently have 161 listings in Stephanie Makes All, 52 listings in One Stitch, and 20 listings in the soon to be closed (at least for now) Stephanie Re-Makes All to test and tweak a little.
Joy, Joy, I feel for the sellers with even more listings who just threw money at renewing, I really do.
The good news is that in One Stitch, I must have done something right, because I only have 3 fingerless glove patterns there right now, and those 3 patterns are spread out between the first 3 pages of the fingerless glove pattern search. And I have started selling several of the one that is on the first page!
I still haven't sold anything in Stephanie Makes All since the change, but I'm coming up pretty high in some searches, so I believe it's only a matter of time :)
Happy Selling!
Steph
As someone who can't throw 20¢ at renewing often, I decided to try to get into Google search from the get go, so I don't really have all that much to do in my shop for relevancy.
But I do currently have 161 listings in Stephanie Makes All, 52 listings in One Stitch, and 20 listings in the soon to be closed (at least for now) Stephanie Re-Makes All to test and tweak a little.
Joy, Joy, I feel for the sellers with even more listings who just threw money at renewing, I really do.
The good news is that in One Stitch, I must have done something right, because I only have 3 fingerless glove patterns there right now, and those 3 patterns are spread out between the first 3 pages of the fingerless glove pattern search. And I have started selling several of the one that is on the first page!
I still haven't sold anything in Stephanie Makes All since the change, but I'm coming up pretty high in some searches, so I believe it's only a matter of time :)
Happy Selling!
Steph
Thursday, August 11, 2011
SEO Site-wide keyword phrase
(Warning! I'm just starting to learn about SEO so you really shouldn't follow my advice about anything based on my bumbling around here . At any given moment half of the things that I say could be completely and absolutely incorrect.)
In my last post I was having a hard time coming up with keyword phrases that create a theme for my shop because my ideas weren't targeted enough and if I used them I would never be found in searches. Then I made myself stop and re-think who my target audience is. Realistically they are women that buy luxury designer fashions. The hardest part was to stop being self-deprecating and be willing to use very upscale words. It's hard to think like an affluent person when you've never been one. Once I did that things improved greatly. I went back to the google keyword tool and tried again with some different words and these were the phrases that I came up with that had only a medium level of competition with a reasonable amount of monthly searches. These are the ones that I chose:
Based on these phrases I changed my shop title and shop announcement. My original shop title was"Handmade Fashions and Accessories" and now it's "Handmade High Quality Designer Fashions and Couture". My shop announcement was "Luxurious natural fiber regular and plus size sweaters, crocheted afghans and blankets and unique and detailed crocheted tams and baby hats". Now it's "Handmade high end regular and plus size designer fashions and couture , crocheted afghans, wool blankets, quilts and accessories all made from natural fibers and luxury yarns. I could also have changed my section names but they were fine as they were. These little changes have already improved my search engine results. I feel so full of myself using words like "couture" but I guess that if I don't see my shop that way no one else will.
Today I'm going to get very organized and create a another spreadsheet to start organizing my keywords for each item. I've gotten a bit distracted by all of the tag upheaval going on at Etsy and spending a lot of time tweaking titles to keep myself relevant. So far I really like the change and I'm getting a lot more views. Hopefully I won't find out that what works for Etsy doesn't work for the major search engines but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Please come see my handmade designer plus size sweaters, sweater coats, capes and shrugs at MirabilisFashions.com
In my last post I was having a hard time coming up with keyword phrases that create a theme for my shop because my ideas weren't targeted enough and if I used them I would never be found in searches. Then I made myself stop and re-think who my target audience is. Realistically they are women that buy luxury designer fashions. The hardest part was to stop being self-deprecating and be willing to use very upscale words. It's hard to think like an affluent person when you've never been one. Once I did that things improved greatly. I went back to the google keyword tool and tried again with some different words and these were the phrases that I came up with that had only a medium level of competition with a reasonable amount of monthly searches. These are the ones that I chose:
| high end couture |
| high end fashion |
| designer couture |
| designer fashion |
| Plus size couture |
| plus size fashion |
| Natural Fiber |
| Natural Fibers |
| crochet afghans |
| wool blankets |
| high quality |
| Luxury |
Based on these phrases I changed my shop title and shop announcement. My original shop title was"Handmade Fashions and Accessories" and now it's "Handmade High Quality Designer Fashions and Couture". My shop announcement was "Luxurious natural fiber regular and plus size sweaters, crocheted afghans and blankets and unique and detailed crocheted tams and baby hats". Now it's "Handmade high end regular and plus size designer fashions and couture , crocheted afghans, wool blankets, quilts and accessories all made from natural fibers and luxury yarns. I could also have changed my section names but they were fine as they were. These little changes have already improved my search engine results. I feel so full of myself using words like "couture" but I guess that if I don't see my shop that way no one else will.
Today I'm going to get very organized and create a another spreadsheet to start organizing my keywords for each item. I've gotten a bit distracted by all of the tag upheaval going on at Etsy and spending a lot of time tweaking titles to keep myself relevant. So far I really like the change and I'm getting a lot more views. Hopefully I won't find out that what works for Etsy doesn't work for the major search engines but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Please come see my handmade designer plus size sweaters, sweater coats, capes and shrugs at MirabilisFashions.com
Monday, August 8, 2011
Selecting the Right Keywords
(Disclaimer: I'm trying to learn this stuff so everything that you read here might be wrong for a while. If I were you I would sit on my hands and not change anything until I see my views improve. I'm focusing on major search engines and when I think I'm done I'll go back and try to fit it into Etsy's policies. Seeing as they change their mind constantly I'm going to leave them for last.)
The science of hunting for keywords is pretty easy. All you need to do is go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and start entering words and short descriptive phrases to see what the competition is and how many searches are performed on it each month. The idea is to select the ones that seem the best to you and then you can star and download them to an Excel spreadsheet.
The art of it is not that easy for me. The idea is to aim for a targeted audience that might buy your item and conventional wisdom says that people use longer and more specific phrases once they are ready to purchase something. If the competition for the keyword is high and it's frequently searched on then you'll probably be buried in huge numbers of results and if the competition and monthly searches are low you might not get a huge number of views but the ones that you get are truly interested in your items and not just window shopping or lost on the internet.
Some keywords are good to describe individual items and some are more relevant to my shop as a whole and those are the ones that I'm starting with first. I'm also going to forget about the hats and blankets for this first pass. These keywords will end up being used in my shop title, shop announcement and section names and should create a theme for my shop. I've spent hours over the last 2 days playing with keywords like fashion, couture, plus size, sweaters, clothing, etc. but they are such common terms that they all have high competition and lots of searches. I started out with a theory that I should find things with a competition less than .5 but so far I haven't even come up with one. You can easily see which keywords are getting people into your shop on Etsy simply by looking at your shop stats and the keywords used for my items are more targeted (for example "Mohair Sweater" or "Plus Size Cardigan"). I'm not sure where to go from here in terms of coming up with more targeted keywords for my shop as a whole but I'm not giving up. I'm going to google around for a few more ideas and then settle on a few key phrases that I feel describe my shop well and make it easier for the people interested in high-end sweaters to find me.
Please come see my handmade designer plus size sweaters, sweater coats, capes and shrugs at MirabilisFashions.com
The science of hunting for keywords is pretty easy. All you need to do is go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and start entering words and short descriptive phrases to see what the competition is and how many searches are performed on it each month. The idea is to select the ones that seem the best to you and then you can star and download them to an Excel spreadsheet.
The art of it is not that easy for me. The idea is to aim for a targeted audience that might buy your item and conventional wisdom says that people use longer and more specific phrases once they are ready to purchase something. If the competition for the keyword is high and it's frequently searched on then you'll probably be buried in huge numbers of results and if the competition and monthly searches are low you might not get a huge number of views but the ones that you get are truly interested in your items and not just window shopping or lost on the internet.
Some keywords are good to describe individual items and some are more relevant to my shop as a whole and those are the ones that I'm starting with first. I'm also going to forget about the hats and blankets for this first pass. These keywords will end up being used in my shop title, shop announcement and section names and should create a theme for my shop. I've spent hours over the last 2 days playing with keywords like fashion, couture, plus size, sweaters, clothing, etc. but they are such common terms that they all have high competition and lots of searches. I started out with a theory that I should find things with a competition less than .5 but so far I haven't even come up with one. You can easily see which keywords are getting people into your shop on Etsy simply by looking at your shop stats and the keywords used for my items are more targeted (for example "Mohair Sweater" or "Plus Size Cardigan"). I'm not sure where to go from here in terms of coming up with more targeted keywords for my shop as a whole but I'm not giving up. I'm going to google around for a few more ideas and then settle on a few key phrases that I feel describe my shop well and make it easier for the people interested in high-end sweaters to find me.
Please come see my handmade designer plus size sweaters, sweater coats, capes and shrugs at MirabilisFashions.com
Saturday, August 6, 2011
An SEO Rant
(Warning - I'm really annoyed from all of the confusion and conflicting information over in the Etsy forums today so this will inevitably include some whining before I get to the end and decide to do something about it.)
I don't normally complain about Etsy much since it's the only home that I have at the moment but it's just crazy over there since they announced the changes to the relevancy search. The admins are contradicting the search engineers, everyone is wailing about not understanding the difference between tag stuffing and using good keyword phrases and people are running amok spreading hysteria and misinformation all over the forums. It's like one of those meetings from hell where no one knows what they're talking about so they just wave their arms around and freak out a lot. The worst part is that I've been wasting time there and doing it too.
I'm mostly annoyed at myself. I've worked in the software field as a programmer, business analyst and project manager and I would never have tolerated this behavior from myself or treated on of my customer's businesses in the way that I'm treating mine. I know how to research these kinds of things and organize myself with a solid plan so that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to stop wasting my time watching people freaking out on the Etsy forums and posting very authoritative sounding guesses about things, figure it out in terms of how major search engines work instead of aiming for Etsy's constantly moving target and then at the very end do my best to make sure that I'm relevant while still not tag stuffing. And I'm not changing another freaking tag until I figure it out!
(The whining part is that I was really hoping that the SEO fairy was going to visit my shop and listings one by one and make it all shiny and perfect and put me on page one of every search engine that there is and give me a pony too.)
I'm reading a series of Bing articles now that seem pretty helpful and go into a bit more detail. In the spirit of starting at the beginning and taking it one step at a time I'm just going to focus on the advice in the first one for now and start working on it tomorrow.
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2009/05/12/who-s-looking-for-you-sem-101.aspx
Please come see my handmade designer plus size sweaters, sweater coats, capes and shrugs at MirabilisFashions.com
I don't normally complain about Etsy much since it's the only home that I have at the moment but it's just crazy over there since they announced the changes to the relevancy search. The admins are contradicting the search engineers, everyone is wailing about not understanding the difference between tag stuffing and using good keyword phrases and people are running amok spreading hysteria and misinformation all over the forums. It's like one of those meetings from hell where no one knows what they're talking about so they just wave their arms around and freak out a lot. The worst part is that I've been wasting time there and doing it too.
I'm mostly annoyed at myself. I've worked in the software field as a programmer, business analyst and project manager and I would never have tolerated this behavior from myself or treated on of my customer's businesses in the way that I'm treating mine. I know how to research these kinds of things and organize myself with a solid plan so that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to stop wasting my time watching people freaking out on the Etsy forums and posting very authoritative sounding guesses about things, figure it out in terms of how major search engines work instead of aiming for Etsy's constantly moving target and then at the very end do my best to make sure that I'm relevant while still not tag stuffing. And I'm not changing another freaking tag until I figure it out!
(The whining part is that I was really hoping that the SEO fairy was going to visit my shop and listings one by one and make it all shiny and perfect and put me on page one of every search engine that there is and give me a pony too.)
I'm reading a series of Bing articles now that seem pretty helpful and go into a bit more detail. In the spirit of starting at the beginning and taking it one step at a time I'm just going to focus on the advice in the first one for now and start working on it tomorrow.
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2009/05/12/who-s-looking-for-you-sem-101.aspx
Please come see my handmade designer plus size sweaters, sweater coats, capes and shrugs at MirabilisFashions.com
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